


It's A Short Drop

by Telaryn



Category: Leverage
Genre: Caffeine Addiction, Cybercrimes, Episode: s03e16 The San Lorenzo Job, Exhaustion, Gen, Missing Scene, Protective Eliot Spencer, Sleep Deprivation, Threats, Threats of Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-15
Updated: 2018-01-15
Packaged: 2019-03-05 01:01:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13376799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Telaryn/pseuds/Telaryn
Summary: Guilt over General Flores being captured and his own sense of loyalty to the team has driven Hardison well past his mental and physical limits. As he tries to find the time and space to rest, Damien Moreau is realizing that the man he dropped into the pool in DC isn't as much of a stranger as he thought.





	It's A Short Drop

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ladyjax](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladyjax/gifts).



> I went with Prompt 4. Hardison and Moreau nearly crossed paths once purely by chance. Hardison didn't realize it but Moreau remembered him when they were in San Lorenzo. I've always held a headcanon that either Moreau and Hardison crossed paths before, or that Moreau recognizes how valuable Hardison could be to his organization.
> 
> I hope you enjoy it, and thank you for playing with us again!

Damien felt a small chill shiver down his spine, as he looked through the report his personal secretary had left for him. He’d dropped the young man with Eliot into the hotel pool in order to make a point with his former enforcer, but now he was starting to wonder if his subconscious mind had – even then – been drawing the necessary connections.

“Alec Hardison,” he murmured, returning to the first sheet in the folder and brushing his fingertips across the photo of the young man with the faintly mocking expression on his face. Damien Moreau was of an age where things like ‘hackers’ and ‘cyber crime’ had first seemed like science fiction, and nothing he ever need concern himself with. You couldn’t conduct a war, close a deal, or destroy your enemy over the internet, after all.

Or so he’d allowed himself to believe. Then, on the eve of renegotiating trade routes through a particularly fractious part of Yemin, a single bank transaction had disappeared while being moved from Moreau’s account to the custody of the local war lord. The bank swore everything had been fine on their end, and Damari was screaming on the other side that none of the funds had come through. Damien hadn’t been in a position to argue with either of them at the time, choosing instead to authorize a replacement payment in gold, delivered directly into Damari’s hands – with an appropriately sized penalty by way of an apology.

He’d set his best people to searching though, once the dust had cleared and the guns were moving again – and it hadn’t taken them long to discover evidence of the hacking that had permitted the theft to take place literally while Moreau had been watching. The bank president had come to San Lorenzo personally to make his report, although what he’d found had hardly been satisfying. “Our security is the best in the world, M. Moreau,” he said – and while Chapman had snorted derisively at the claim, Damien already knew it to be true, which was why the man was still breathing.

“For a penetration like this to take place,” he’d hurried on, “there are four, maybe five in the world who could pull it off successfully.” He’d dutifully presented the corresponding dossiers, one of which had belonged to Alec Hardison, but had then gone on to admit that they had no means to narrow the field beyond these five. “Criminals like these,” he’d explained, “only leave traces when they choose to. Our man wants us to know we’ve been beaten and how, but he will leave us no clues leading directly to him.”

Damien had wanted revenge at the time. Chapman had insisted on it, volunteering to round up the bank’s five suspects personally and bring them to Moreau himself. Practical considerations had won the day, however, and inadvertently prolonged Alec Hardison’s life – Damien was still recovering from losing Eliot, and couldn’t risk any further hint of vulnerability or instability in his organization. The bank’s insurance restored the funds he’d lost, Chapman was forced to stand down, and life had gradually begun its evolution into what would be Moreau’s new way of doing business in the modern world.

 _And yet, here you are again._ Eliot and his new master were still very much the priority – else why had he used Manticore instead of just taking General Flores and his men into custody? It wasn’t as though the anti-government forces had any place to hide that Damien couldn’t buy his way into. Using the purloined software to pinpoint Flores location and then take him prisoner while Eliot was watching had been about laying out more of a challenge than Spencer would be able to walk away from.

They would come to San Lorenzo – each of them hunting Damien for their own reasons – and it was here that he would end all of them for good.  
**************************************  
There came a point on every job where Hardison’s brain shifted to auto-pilot, and his body continued to operate as normal. Most of the time this point came at the end of a job, where a good twenty-four hours of uninterrupted sleep was right around the corner. Other times they were able to carve out an hour or two to let him decompress, let mind and body drift until he was capable of functioning properly again.

The night before the San Lorenzo election, juggling more balls of cyber-wizardry than he could ever remember trying to keep in the air at once, was not either of those times. On some level Hardison knew that and he really was trying his best. The problem was that Eliot’s fear-fueled accusations of who was really responsible for General Flores being taken prisoner and the whole election thing being more complicated than it should have been, had struck more deeply than the hacker was willing to admit to anyone.

He hadn’t been sleeping. And his most recent swig of orange soda had tasted horribly metallic – a sign he remembered from his teenage years that meant he’d forced all the caffeine into his system that his body was capable of dealing with. Any more, and he risked taking himself out of the game entirely. _And wouldn’t Nate and Eliot just love that?_

Political and socio-political concerns aside, Hardison needed a break or he was going to start making mistakes – awareness of which cycled him right back to the whole Flores mess being his fault in the first place.

“Go,” Sophie urged him. “Nothing’s going to change that much in the next couple of hours. Keep your comm handy, but I’ll make sure the others give you at least a little time.”

She was the only one capable of breaking through his autopilot, and resetting his system on a proper manual course. Nodding vaguely at his teammate, Hardison slipped his comm into his pocket and shambled towards the glass doors leading into the garden. Outdoors wasn’t ever his first choice, but it was ‘away’, it was closer than any of the rooms he could have reached that would have afforded him some privacy, and it gave him something to look at that wasn’t a computer screen.

Sitting on the first bench he found, Hardison stretched out on his back and pillowed his head on his hands. “At least it’s a short drop,” he chuckled, planting his feet on the ground on either side in what he had to admit was going to be a futile attempt to keep him in place if he really did fall asleep.

There was too much light pollution to show him how many stars were really visible, but there was something soothing about just letting his thoughts drift as he watched the night sky arch over his head. _We’re going to pull this off,_ he decided, as his anxieties finally quieted for the first time in what felt like days. Nate was giving him almost an entirely free hand with the election, and the important battles were being fought where he had no equal. The idea that they could lose wasn’t even worth considering.

The ratchet sound of a bullet being chambered froze all other thoughts in Hardison’s mind. “Alec Hardison,” a heavily accented voice said, “Mr. Moreau wishes to speak with you.”

_Ah, hell._

Risking a glance before rolling back into a sitting position, Hardison saw three men – all armed with identical semi-automatic pistols. Memory of how close he’d come to drowning at his last meeting with Moreau tightened his chest; at least this time if he refused to listen Moreau’s response was likely to be more decisive. _Less…whimsical._ “Can I help you gentlemen?” he asked, defaulting to the idea that he had _no_ idea what these fine folk could want with the likes of him…no idea at all.

 _Nothing to see here._  
******************************  
It was nearly dawn when a knock on his study door finally roused Moreau. _Finally._ He’d tried distracting himself for hours since sending his people out to retrieve Alec Hardison – first with work, then with a bottle of his favorite brandy. The inescapable truth was that it shouldn’t have taken this long to collect one man – particularly because he’d left Eliot no reason to think he even remembered Alec Hardison, let alone had any discernible interest in him.

He’d taken every possible angle into consideration, and yet when he opened his door and found his men unconscious and drooling into the carpet, Damien couldn’t even muster the effort to be surprised.  
********************************  
“You,” Eliot ordered, letting Hardison go with a small shove, “go _nowhere_ by yourself until the job is done. Not even to the can, you hear me?” He was still shaking from the adrenaline, and on some level the hitter knew that his reaction was mostly being fueled by that fact, but coming up on Hardison surrounded by three of Moreau’s armed thugs had been much too close to the subject of his recent nightmares for comfort.

Hardison staggered slightly, before making it safely to a chair. Parker was at his side almost immediately, and Sophie was moving in as well with her expected air of concern. Nate was standing in the doorway of Draper’s ‘office’, arms crossed over his chest, his expression almost a scowl. Turning to the familiar to steady himself, Eliot faced the mastermind to give his report. “I don’t know how, but he’s on Moreau’s radar. Three men, all armed, and they weren’t prepared to take no for an answer.”

“Bastards called me out by name,” Hardison managed, his teeth audibly chattering as he hovered on the edge of shock. Before Eliot could think about where to lay his hands on a blanket, Nate stepped forward. “Bring him in here,” he told Parker and Sophie. “Put him on the couch; there’s a blanket, and it’s as defensible as any place in San Lorenzo.” The look on the thief’s face clearly said that there was no way she was leaving Hardison’s side unless Nate himself made her.

Eliot decided he was okay with that. “We can give him about six hours before he’s got to be back on the job,” Nate said, moving closer to Eliot and guiding the hitter away from the others. “I knew he was pushing himself but that was a wrench we didn’t need.”

“I took the liberty of sending a message,” Eliot admitted. “Moreau knows I’ll be watching from now on.”

“That worries me too,” Nate said. Instead of bringing up the warehouse, which Eliot realized he’d been half-expecting the older man to do, he said, “By your own admission Moreau knows you better than any man breathing. Could this be a move to distract you from something else?”

Eliot had already been over that ground and come out the other side. “Doesn’t feel like it. It could be something from the hotel in DC, but Hardison never used his real name.”

Nate was silent for a long moment. “You know what? I don’t care what it is – he’s not getting him.”

“Don’t go waving him like a red flag in Moreau’s face,” Eliot said grimly, “and I’ll make sure he knows what the score is.”  
*************************************  
“It’s going to be okay,” Sophie told Hardison, as they listened to Nate and Eliot from the safety of the darkened office. “Try to rest.”

That wasn’t going to be a problem with his team close and Parker stroking his hair in an effort to help him relax, but Hardison’s head was spinning regardless – trying to reconstruct whatever link bound him to Damien Moreau. _If it’s not some kind of strategy play…_

And just like that, the connection snapped into place. “Aw hell,” the hacker groaned.

“Cyber heist,” he said, forcing himself to look up at Parker and Sophie. “Pretty sure he made me from a heist I pulled about four-five years ago – right before hooking up with y’all. That’s what this is about.”

Sophie nodded. “I’ll tell them.”

Parker huffed softly as soon as she was gone. “Big baby,” she muttered.

Momentarily confused, Hardison twisted around to look up at her. “You took his stuff fair and square, right?”

Slowly, Hardison nodded – hoping that at least in Parker’s worldview his heist had qualified for a “fair and square” label. “He was paying off some warlord. I redirected the money.”

“Okay then,” she agreed, patting him on the shoulder. “He’s just a big baby and Eliot’s going to spank him for you.”

Hardison was still giggling five minutes later, when a concerned Parker went to get the others. The last thing he consciously remembered was Sophie talking about tranquilizers, before the darkness finally claimed him at last.


End file.
